Samsung announced its Galaxy Note 5 and Galaxy S6 Edge+ yesterday. They’ll be available in the US on August 21, about 1.5 months earlier than the Galaxy Note 4 debut in 2014. Why the shift in timing? Samsung’s intent is to attract consumers before Apple announces its next iPhones. I wrote a little piece on that last month, titled Samsung Adjusts its “Pre-Empt and Out-Size” Launch Tempo. It’s not too long, but if you just want a conclusion, here’s mine:

Will it make a meaningful difference? Perhaps, in a small way. I’m sure Samsung’s done the math; looked at when consumers in the US and other markets are most likely to upgrade their handsets. The August timing might align with that. And, as the smartphone market saturates, many of the late adopters aren’t loyal to particular brand, including Apple. So, an earlier Note launch might attract some of these consumers. But, fundamentally, this is a tactic; it doesn’t change the drivers of Apple’s or Samsung’s fortunes. Apple has excellent hardware and software, and an excellent ecosystem. Samsung just has really good hardware. That’s why Apple is number one in profit, and Samsung is number two. This move won’t change the overall situation.

The mobile phone in general and the smartphone in particular are designed to be carried first, and spoken into second. […] They’ve fallen out of favor because using the telephone feels mechanically ungainly as much as socially so. Don’t Hate the Phone Call, Hate the Phone (Ian Bogost; The Atlantic)

Language like “interface-free” and “invisible UI” point up just how stuck we are on the idea of VISUAL interfaces. (Josh Clark, @bigmediumjosh; Twitter)

[Samsung] will move up the autumn launch of its oversize smartphone lineup by several weeks to mid-August, according to a person familiar with the matter.

The South Korean company’s move is part of a bid to give its Galaxy Note smartphone-tablet hybrids some breathing room before mid-September, when Apple Inc. typically unveils its refreshed iPhone—a product whose popularity has the potential to monopolize media and consumer attention for weeks.

[Last year] Not only did the iPhone 6 Plus’s 5.5-inch screen rival the Galaxy Note 4’s 5.7-inch screen, the new iPhones were unveiled six days after the Galaxy Note 4 was introduced on September 3. The Galaxy Note 4 went on sale just weeks after the new iPhones.

It was the first Android OEM to develop a global flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S, in 2010. It took other Android vendors years, in some cases, to realize they couldn’t have their A team work on 40 – 80 different products per year. And that they couldn’t fragment their sales team time and media spend, either.1

It took inspiration [a euphemism] from the iPhone to a much higher degree than other Android OEMs. It’s not a move I respect but, in retrospect, it was very effective. Court fines were a fraction of what market losses could have been.

It ramped up its media spend. Good products deserve good marketing (or at least an attempt). It took other OEMs time to realize that if you concentrate your product risk into one product, you need to back that product with media. HTC learned that the hard way.

Samsung created the phablet. Great move. I don’t know if it was anticipatory or an experiment, but it really doesn’t matter.

Finally, with both a mainstream flagship (Galaxy S) and a phablet flagship (Galaxy Note), it decided to book-end the iPhone’s annual launch. Each year, it introduced the Galaxy S in the spring and the Galaxy Note in the fall. Its intent was to capture new smartphone users and iPhone-defectors (few) prior to the iPhone’s launch, and then to offer something different (larger display) after the launch, with the Note. In a nutshell, it was a “pre-empt and out-size” tempo.

These actions worked. Samsung was the only smartphone maker to earn a profit, other than Apple. For many quarters, Apple would earn approximately 60% of the profits in the handset industry, and Samsung would earn approximately 40%. (Other companies’ profits were minimal, or negative.)

But then something changed. Apple finally introduced a larger-display smartphone, the iPhone 6 plus. Now, the “out-size” aspect of the tempo no longer makes sense. And Apple’s share of profits has climbed to 92%. So Samsung is focusing on the “pre-empt” aspect, by moving up the launch of the Galaxy Note line.

Will it make a meaningful difference? Perhaps, in a small way. I’m sure Samsung’s done the math; looked at when consumers in the US and other markets are most likely to upgrade their handsets. The August timing might align with that. And, as the smartphone market saturates, many of the late adopters aren’t loyal to particular brand, including Apple. So, an earlier Note launch might attract some of these consumers. But, fundamentally, this is a tactic; it doesn’t change the drivers of Apple’s or Samsung’s fortunes. Apple has excellent hardware and software, and an excellent ecosystem. Samsung just has really good hardware. That’s why Apple is number one in profit, and Samsung is number two. This move won’t change the overall situation.

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1 Samsung, itself, continued launching dozens of product per year, but it had a resource advantage that other OEMs did not.

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Update: I updated the last paragraph of this post to include Apple’s ecosystem, and made several other minor changes. I also added the statement and link about Apple taking 92% of the smartphone industry’s profits.

“As phones get bigger the space issue becomes less challenging,” he said, pulling his Nexus 6 smartphone out to show its six-inch display. “This is essentially a tablet. People’s ability to navigate sites and fill out forms and such goes up tremendously.”

That makes sense.

On Google’s progress in mobile advertising:

WSJD: Did Google underestimate the impact of mobile on search and ad prices?

We recognized the power of mobile from very early on. I don’t think we haven’t taken mobile seriously. Android was an early bet on this. But for all companies, not just us, it’s one of these things where the pace of change is quite incredible, in spite of all the early investments that companies and people like (Google founders) Larry (Page) and Sergey (Brin) did.

I’m sure Google recognized the potential early on. It’s one of the best high-performance companies I’ve seen. (Meaning, it has great people, pursues great goals, and achieves many great outcomes.)

But here’s what I think when I see a big company under-respond to a big trend: it’s a big company. There likely isn’t a small, focused team with freedom of action to experiment and move fast. There probably *is* a bright, motivated set of people, but distributed across several teams, with several layers of management, trying to look outward, inward, propose, and respond (internally, via slides) to many requests, constraints, and status checks. That’s what big companies are: a revenue engine that supports many, with tons of talented people and potential directions, but a lot of complexity. Good work gets done, but more slowly. Risk is reduced, but some central opportunities go under-developed.

That said, a small team is no guarantee of success. It would take Google to count all the small companies and small teams that fail. But it helps… with speed – in orientation, decision, action, and repeating that as necessary. Combine the resources of Google with the dexterity of small teams, and the potential for achieving great things, including winning in the mobile advertising market, is high.

It’s been seven months since Apple released its iPhone 6 models. Supply and demand have settled, so it’s a good time to see how popular the 6 Plus model is, compared to other available iPhone models.

Data from Mixpanel, a web and mobile app analytics firm, gives us some insight. It shows how important iPhone 6 Plus is to Apple’s smartphone business. The 6 Plus drives about one-fourth of current generation units and it drives about one in twelve of total iPhone units. It satisfied a meaningful number of consumers who wanted a larger display model, and it likely retained or acquired a decent number of consumers who would have otherwise opted for an Android smartphone.